January 31, 2007

i must admit that the last week or so has been largely given up to managing the many details of this and other projects. sometimes i can muse about unreliable narrators, sometimes i am eavesdropping, sometimes i am composing, and sometimes - like this week - i am tweaking the budget, having meetings with susan, with creative capital, with the seward park librarians. the piece will not be conducted in performance but we need someone to lead the rehearsal process. the performance date (in september) may work for everyone but what about a rain date? if the musicians need music we will need to rent stands, with clips so the music doesn't blow away. we need insurance. we need permits from the city & parks department. we need a copyist. we need a videographer. happily, i find logistics strangely satisfying. maybe this is why all of the books in my apartment are arranged alphabetically and by category. i have been paying attention to the world of the MTA, though - and so have you! mick, gordon, thank you for some of the below:

Just tell me a time and a place and give me ten minutes to get there.
You get a salary and everything.
Give me the keys.
Is this a shoes-required event?
...and she does it with Q-tips.
I don't stick my nose into everything like you do.
There's no such thing as a mandatory optional project.

January 25, 2007

January 24, 2007

rkirz says "plus, it's a narrative if blogger says it is." of course that assumes that blogger is reliable :)

but seriously, here are a few extra thoughts: the way it works with narrative (i mean language, fiction) is that we read the seemingly sincere recountings of things from a narrator - either first person or third person - and gradually get the sense that the author is playing with us by making us hear stuff from someone whose perceptions are skewed. the problem with this experience for me (and the analogous musical situations suggested by the unreliable narrator comment posse) is that one must buy in to the Mastery of the author, who by using this technique is assuming himself to be presenting us (reliably!) with a certain and realized, if unreliable, narrator. if, as briank says, "the personal voice is almost always more interesting, and capable of connecting us on a deeper level with the truth of our experience," then the use of an unreliable narrator as a conceit is in fact distancing us from the deeper connection that we might enjoy if the author were just showing up as a faithful and richly flawed person like the rest of us.

we would need to acknowledge this same Mastery (reliability) of the creator if we embrace the idea that, as rkirz says, a composer can "establish something so clearly in the mind/memory of the listener..." as brubiel points out. that's some real estate!! in the end i think that without artful pastiche, which takes us mostly outside of the main stuff of the musical medium (sonic materials), i don't feel convinced that we have found an unreliable narration in music. but i'm sure we haven't exhausted this subject...

January 20, 2007

finishing up svevo's 'senilita' last week, i read the introduction (i always read the intro after i read the book, if at all), which talked at length about the rise of the unreliable narrator in modernist fiction. books in the first person are easiest to talk about this way. is the narrator ("I") actually the author (probably not). is s/he 'reliable'? (in other words, is s/he giving us an 'accurate' picture or portayal of what happened, and what does that mean anyway??) and of course the author can play god, design a narrator who is unreliable in wonderfully inventive ways. svevo's book is in the third person, however - and one wonders throughout how reliable the hidden narrator is. we are also certain that, in the passages where he is (presumably faithfully) describing things from the point of view of one of the characters, these characters also have a pretty warped picture of what's going on in their relations with one another.

by collecting many utterances from people in public spaces and lifting them out of context, i am most certainly enhancing the unreliability of their 'narration' within my new context. then i am also combining them into new quasi-narratives (like the aimlessness song) i am, i suppose, creating new narrators. composite narrators that are also not me. and who is to say whether or not they are reliable?

then they will be sung (overheard again!) in public spaces, by susan, who will bring her own interpretation, in a dramaturgical sense, to these fabricated characters.

i'm thinking about this a lot because i am having a lot of great discussions about whether or not music can have an unreliable narrator. above i outline only the textual aspects of unreliability in my project. but what about the music? can i - should i - be writing unreliable music for this piece? what would that be??

January 19, 2007

yesterday i had a special visit to the isabella stewart gardner museum in boston. special because my friend and fellow creative capital grantee ledoh is in residence there (literally - he's living in the carriage house!), and he took brian knep and me around the building that he has spent so much time in. he really knows all of the details and history of the place. one very exciting idea that came up: what about doing some of 'chance encounter' in the courtyard??

January 18, 2007

January 16, 2007

although i spent much less time in public this past week, hunkering down to finish the 'aimlessness song' and making good progress on the existential commonplaces one (which i may simply call 'nothing'), i did drop by the seward park library on wednesday and speak to their supervising librarian mary jones about the possibility of doing the premiere there in september. she took me up to the wedding-cake roof, which used to be a garden cafe, and showed me some archival photos of the library back 100 years ago when it first opened. we had a very exciting meeting - seems like a great match. here are a couple of photos of the library and its setting, from across the street:

it's located down at east broadway, in the lower corner of the green triangle you can see on this old map mary showed me in the archives:

meanwhile, while i am home working you all are out in the world hearing magnificent things and reporting back to me! thank you carla, gordon, robert, katerina, peter, these are peerless:

I have some theoretical baby in the future.
The business is...the business...is...my life.
Ugly sunglasses are chic in France.
I told you to watch your language and you put your hands on me.
What was I gonna say? I'm a veteran and I was beat up by a cop?
Sometimes I have dreams where at the end of the dream the credits roll.

If you text him a message with 140 signs about business and then 15 personal ones, it won´t sound evil! Like for example, Wanna visit me emoticon question mark!

Yeah, Yo...YEAH, Yo!...I know: right?...Yeahhhhh, Yo!

(peter, who transcribed this last one quite faithfully, remarks that the colon is of paramount importance - i agree.)

January 10, 2007

this new category is fun because it brings together things from many of the other categories and yet hangs together quite well. the question is - when i write the music, will i use these statements in both songs? i'd like the answer to be yes, which means that i will be setting some text twice, in two totally different contexts and interpretations. this is, of course, what makes it hard to do though, because when i am trying to develop unique music for a new section, the old setting of the text comes back and my head gets all busy. but if i use the new text to develop the musical material and then re-introduce the 'used' text, i may succeed. here's my Imperatives Song so far (some of these are from you! susan, win, thank you!):

January 09, 2007

this first week of 2007 included a short jaunt up to nantasket beach in hull, MA near boston, where i was leading a workshop for the faculty and staff of the boston arts academy. i hit penn station again, plus the nyc subway and boston T, plus a water shuttle that stopped off at the logan airport on the way back to boston:

Take a picture of me on the phone with him.
Why doesn't he look like me?
Who cuts it that close?
Am I on the room list? Am I good to go?
If we were in India right now we'd be sinking.
No turbo-props, and I'll need cars everyplace.
Oh no, we're gonna crash into the city!

i admit to retiring to the quiet car on the train home, aurally sated. gave me a chance to enjoy the sunset from the train: